Skykeep (12 page)

#

Coop held firm to a line and rappelled into
the inky blackness below. Some might have marveled at the speed
with which some skills come rushing back after years of neglect. It
had been years since he’d done any rock climbing, after all, and he
was climbing like a pro again after just a few minutes. Coop wasn’t
the sort to introspect and reflect on such things, though. He
wasn’t really the sort who would reflect on anything. As far as he
was concerned, skills like these came back quickly because if they
didn’t, he would die, and he was far too busy to die today.

Though his mind was mostly occupied with the
complicated task of descending into the bowels of the mountain, one
or two thoughts wormed their way into whatever nooks and crannies
of his mind were free to grapple with them. The first was the
grudging acceptance of the fact that climbing in a mine was indeed
much
different than climbing a mountain, even at night. As
dark as a moonless night might be, it had
nothing
on a mine.
The darkness was as thick as porridge, and the weak blue flame of
the mining helmet he’d borrowed barely seemed to slice so much as a
wedge into it. Early on in the climb that didn’t matter. The shaft
was almost perfectly vertical, and the fuggers had left all of
their climbing anchors and ropes in place. Leave it to those
arrogant swine to assume no one would even attempt to follow them.
Once he reached the point where the shaft was increasingly mingled
with natural caves and tunnels in the mountain, the lengths of rope
and strings of anchors began to thin out and he was left looking
for handholds and footholds by the light of the aforementioned weak
helmet flame. They were not the climbing conditions he would have
chosen, but all it took was one little flicker of an image in his
mind, the thought that something might be happening to his sister
at that moment, and he was practically flinging himself into the
blackness.

Another thought that had disturbed him from
time to time was the matter of finding his way through the mine.
Again, once the initial shaft ran its course there were no shortage
of branching paths, and he assumed only one of them was the right
one to take. Sometimes it was easy enough, because there was an
anchor driven into the rock here or a rope hanging from an outcrop
there. Other times there were long stretches of relatively level
ground with branching paths in all directions. The way forward at
those times had been determined by whichever path had the strongest
chemical sting against his skin and the foulest scent in the air.
When he’d progressed far enough that he needed his mask to breathe,
he knew he had to be close. Of course, he also had even
less
visibility and had to cope with getting enough air through a mask
that made it difficult to breathe even
without
exerting
himself, but one of the benefits of spending half his time among
the clouds was learning how to get by without much “air” to his
air.

The ground snuck up on him for the third time
since he’d been climbing. That tended to happen while rappelling in
the darkness. The seat of his pants hit the jagged rocks hard
enough to ensure that he would be walking funny for the next few
hours, and he wisely took a few moments to recover. When he felt
confident he could stand without falling over, he leaned aside to
place his hand on the ground to hoist himself up, but it brushed
against something that was certainly not stone.

“What in the world?” he muttered, gingerly
touching it again.

It felt like a length of string. He turned to
it, casting the light of the mining helmet to reveal a thread
stretched between metal struts driven into the stone. One strut
also had a small bundle of something that looked and smelled a bit
like burn-slow mounted to it.

“I don’t know what this thing is,” he
muttered to himself, “but I know the fuggers must have put it here,
and that means it probably means to do me harm. Best to leave it
be.”

He stepped over the wire with exaggerated
care… and planted his foot squarely on a second wire.

The wire popped free, and he instinctively
broke into a full sprint. In less dire circumstances, sprinting
along the ground at the base of the latest of several multihundred
foot drops would not have been very keen survival instinct, but in
light of the unknown mechanism that he had just triggered, he
decided it was the least suicidal of the options available. He got
a total of ten steps away before his sprint turned into an
out-of-control tumble down a loose gravel slope. About halfway
through his tumble, a deafening blast roared through the cave as
the trap he’d set off detonated.

A flash of light and a wave of debris filled
the air, and the rattle and clatter of his rapid descent was
replaced by the sudden silence that came from the ears getting more
than they could handle. Now in utter darkness and in the best case
temporarily
deafened, Cooper was left with nothing but touch
to navigate by. In this case, navigation was limited to getting a
rough idea of the size and shape of the gravel he was tumbling
along as he fell.

After what felt like several hours of
rolling, he slid to a stop. The fall had not treated him kindly.
His body felt like one enormous bruise, and it was a miracle both
that he’d not broken any bones and that his mask hadn’t become
dislodged. One of his rifles had broken free of its strap, though,
and both of his pistols were somewhere along the slope. But a quick
inventory taken while attempting to catch his breath indicated
that, aside from a broken lamp on his helmet, he was otherwise
still fully equipped.

Another miracle came in the form of an almost
imperceptibly dim glow coming from his left. With a bit of
squinting, he was just able to make out the jagged natural cave
mouth that must have led out into the fug. He stumbled to his feet
and walked unsteadily toward the dull purple light.

What greeted him on the outside was a rather
steep slope that was host to a deserted shantytown of sorts. Three
tents each barely clung to the slope. A few half-empty crates of
provisions and assorted other things were scattered among them, but
his half-blurred and barely adequate vision couldn’t quite make
them out. A little bit of digging in one of the supply crates
revealed a handheld phlo-light. He turned the valve and summoned a
strong green glow to light his surroundings.

Now with a clearer view, he could see that
people had been living here for some time. There was an outhouse
dug not far away, and man-sized mooring poles had been driven into
the slope. It was also apparent that the departure had been a hasty
one, as one of the mooring poles had been hauled halfway out of the
ground, which tended to occur when the engines of an airship were
already spinning up to speed before it was completely unmoored.
Here and there he also found recent char and scattered piles of
ashes. They’d set fire to something before they left. Coop had no
doubt in his mind that it was travel orders or some other bit of
evidence that would have given him an idea of where they’d gotten
off to. He sifted through the cinders, but they had been thorough.
There wasn’t a single intact page.

He started to rummage through the supplies to
see if there was anything of value. He found a pistol much like the
ones he’d lost—not surprising since the ones he’d been armed with
were fug-made. There was also a staggering amount of ammunition,
indicating perhaps they had been prepared for a fight. Pity they
hadn’t still been present or he would have given them one. Under a
third box of bullets, he found a well-hidden folio, which he tore
open hoping to find some useful information. Instead he found
images of rather scantily clad, ghost-white women, scrawny
women.

“Huh, the fuggers have ladies after all. And
they ain’t got no meat on them, either,” Coop observed, flipping
through the pages.

His hearing was returning, or at least
silence had been replaced with a loud hiss, when he finally decided
that there simply wasn’t anything worth finding in the camp. He dug
through his pack and found a phlo-flare. The name was a bit much,
considering it was just a small canister of phlogiston with a valve
locked closed by a pin. On the surface, phlogiston was a simple
green vapor, but when released into the fug it had a brilliant
green glow. This was what made phlo-lights work, but it had other
uses, too. Airships in the fug could easily spot a slow leak
because it would glow as bright as day. And of course, if you
wanted to catch someone’s attention, all you had to do was release
a stream of the stuff and it would rush skyward, tracing a bright
green line to where you were waiting.

He pulled the pin and heaved the canister, a
lance of blinding green light curling into the purple-black abyss
the fuggers called a sky. Now there was nothing to do but wait. And
ready his rifle, of course, because there was no guarantee it would
be the
Wind Breaker
that found him first.

Slowly the hiss in his ears began to subside,
and he heard something else. It was a quiet ticking noise. He
looked cautiously to the source of the sound, which was well
outside the circle of light cast by the pho-light.

“I swear, if these fuggers left another
bomb,” he growled, as though he could intimidate the hypothetical
explosive into defusing itself.

He picked up the phlo-light and paced toward
the sound, swapping the rifle for the pistol. As he paced closer to
the source of the ticking, he noticed it seemed a bit too irregular
to be a clock—or something which would be
activated
by a
clock. About thirty paces from the campsite, he found a long wooden
pole. The bottom of it had a point that was darkened with soil,
indicating it too had been driven into the slope previously. It was
easily twenty feet long, and at the end was a broken reed basket.
The ticking was coming from within the basket.

Erring on the side of caution, he traced a
wide circle around the basket and bent low to peer inside. Huddled
within, tapping weakly, was a badly injured aye-aye. From the looks
of it the former occupants of the camp had done their best to
eliminate the creature in the same way that they had the paperwork.
Three large sections of its fur were charred black, though in no
case did it appear to have reached the flesh. What
had
reached the flesh was a large and ugly gunshot wound. It was
probably a grazing blow, but it had nearly clipped the poor thing’s
tail in half.

“Ugh, they did a number on you, little guy,”
he said. “What was this, your perch?”

At the sound of his voice the creature
huddled a little deeper into the broken basket. Coop looked at the
ground and noticed an irregular pattern of blood drops leading back
toward the camp.

“Did you drag this whole thing from way over
there?” he said. “Tough little rat, aren’t you?”

He leaned down, holstering his weapon so that
he could reach into the basket. The creature tried to cram itself
even further inside, but it plainly didn’t have much strength left.
Coop managed to unhook the leash that tethered the creature to the
perch and scooped it up. The thing resisted with what little force
it could.

“Relax, you little bugger. The cap’n’s got a
soft spot for you things. He’d have a fit if he found out I let one
of you die. Besides, if the fuggers wanted you dead, I sure as
sugar want you alive.”

A low hum began to approach, and Coop
recognized it immediately as the five-engined thrum of the
Wind
Breaker
.

“That’s them now,” he said, aye-aye held to
his chest. “Let’s get you fixed up and see what you’ve got to
say.”

#

Coop worked quickly once the
Wind
Breaker
arrived, loading up virtually all of the remaining
goods from the camp and handing off the rescued aye-aye to Gunner.
Once they were on their way, surfacing and finding a hidden nook
among the mountain peaks to tie up the ship, the crew rushed to the
galley, which in times such as this doubled as the infirmary. Butch
made a rare appearance out from behind the counter in order to tend
to those who needed medical attention. First and foremost was the
rescued inspector, which was still dazed when Coop entered to see
what progress had been made. Butch had a needle and thread,
stitching up the part of the beast’s tail that could be salvaged as
the creature rested comfortably on a towel. Both swaths of
blackened hair had been shaved away and some manner of ointment had
been swabbed on the skin beneath.

“What’d you give that thing? It looks like
it’s actually enjoying the surgery,” Coop said.

“Two shots of my rotgut,” Mack said. “That’s
just about how much it takes to knock Wink for a loop, so it stands
to reason it’d be the same for this one.”

“Captain, is there a reason you know the
precise dosage of rye necessary to anesthetize an inspector?”

“That’s a fine anecdote, but one for another
time, Gunner,” he said.

“Is the little critter going to make it?”
Coop asked.

Butch muttered something under her
breath.

“Well, I’ll let you treat my bumps and
bruises once you got Nick all patched up.”

“Nick?” Gunner said.

“Yeah. Because of that little Nick on his
tail. Nick.”

“Coop, that’s a female.”

“… How do you know?”

Gunner looked at him. “Do you really need me
to explain that?”

“Oh… Well, Nikita then,” he said.

“Nikita? I wouldn’t have expected you to
know
a name as exotic as that,” Gunner said.

“Remember last time we spent a night at
Keystone, that waitress who wouldn’t even tell you her name?” Coop
said.

“Yes.”

“Her name was Nikita. And she snored like a
banshee.”

“I would ask how you could have possibly
wooed her, but one can only imagine it was your gift for metaphor.
Should I point out that Nikita is usually a male name?”